Limelight · Musical theatre

Glad To See You

Choreography by Valerie Bettis

Glad To See You was a 1944 wartime musical comedy about a USO entertainment troupe touring the Pacific Theater, built as a Broadway vehicle for Phil Silvers but never reaching New York. It tried out in Philadelphia and Boston with a score by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, staging by Busby Berkeley, and choreography by Valerie Bettis, and closed in Boston on 6 January 1945 without a Broadway opening.

What is danced

The source article does not describe any choreography, step vocabulary, or staged movement from the production beyond the bare credit that Valerie Bettis choreographed it. It lists seventeen musical numbers by title ("Give Us Dames", "Most Unusual Weather (For This Time of Year)", "I Murdered Them in Chicago" among them) but gives no synopsis, no scene breakdown, and no account of which numbers were danced, sung, or comic bits. Busby Berkeley's involvement as stager and director suggests the kind of large-ensemble, geometrically arranged production numbers he was known for in film, and titles like "Give Us Dames" read as chorus/showgirl numbers, but this is inference from the article's credits, not something the article itself states about the movement.

As a result, nothing here can be responsibly coded to a specific dance style: there is no quotable description of steps, holds, technique, or ensemble patterning to attach a taxonomy code to.

Context

The production sits at the intersection of Broadway and Hollywood in the war years: Busby Berkeley directing and staging a stage musical, with a Styne–Cahn score written during the peak of their wartime song output, and a cast drawn from film, radio and vaudeville (Jane Withers, June Knight, Eddie Foy Jr., a young Gene Barry). Valerie Bettis's presence as choreographer places a modern-dance-trained artist inside a commercial Broadway-bound tryout, a common crossover pattern in the 1940s as modern choreographers worked musical theatre jobs between concert commissions, though the article gives no specifics of what she made for this show.

Staging history

The show never played Broadway. It opened at the Schubert Theatre (now the Miller) in Philadelphia on 13 November 1944, moved to the Opera House in Boston on 13 December, and closed there on 6 January 1945. Along the way it lost its intended star (Phil Silvers, replaced by Eddie Davis, who also co-wrote the book), its book-writer-turned-lead to a car accident (with lyricist Sammy Cahn stepping in), its director (Berkeley left for Hollywood, replaced by Charles Conaway), and gained a last-minute lead (Eddie Foy Jr.). The article states it "is not known to have been staged since its 1944–45 flop."

How to watch it

There is no performance record to watch and, per the article, no known staging since the 1945 Boston closing, so approach this as an archival/production-history case rather than a repertory work with observable choreography. If reconstructing or researching it, the useful angle is the collision of Busby Berkeley's Hollywood revue sensibility with Broadway tryout conditions, not any surviving dance text.

Questions

Did Glad To See You ever open on Broadway?
No. It played out-of-town tryouts in Philadelphia and Boston in late 1944 and January 1945 and closed in Boston without transferring to New York.
Who was originally meant to star in it?
Phil Silvers, whose catchphrase "Glad to see you" gave the show its title, but he was unavailable and the role went to Eddie Davis, who had also co-written the book.
What happened to Valerie Bettis's choreography for the show?
The article does not describe it; it only credits her as choreographer. No account of specific numbers or vocabulary survives in this source.
Did any songs from the show survive its failure?
Yes — "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" became a pop standard covered by Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles and others, and "B 'Postrophe, K No 'Postrophe, L-Y-N" was reused in the 1950 film The West Point Story.
This entry was written from “Glad To See You” on English Wikipedia (revision 1329680372), used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The link points at the exact revision this text was written from, so it shows the words we actually used rather than whatever the article says today. Credits and premiere data come from Wikidata (CC0), cited per field.